Christine (26 page)

27

Arnie and Regina

He let himself into the house that night at quarter of twelve. The clothes he had been wearing with the shopping trip to Pittsburgh in mind were grease- and sweat-stained. His hands were more deeply grimed, and a shallow cut corkscrewed across the back of the left like a brand. His face looked haggard and stunned. There were dark circles under his eyes.

His mother sat at the table, a game of solitaire laid out in front of her. She had been waiting for him to come home and dreading it deeply at the same time. Leigh had called and told her what had happened. The girl, who had impressed Regina as being quite a nice girl (if perhaps not quite good enough for her son), sounded as if she had been crying.

Regina, alarmed, had hung up as quickly as she could and had dialled Darnell's Garage. Leigh had told her Arnie had called for a tow-truck from there and had ridden in with the driver. He had put her in a taxi, over her protests. The phone had rung twice and then a wheezy yet gravelly voice had said, “Yuh. Darnell's.”

She had hung up, realizing it would be a mistake to talk to him there—and it looked as if she and Mike had already made enough mistakes about Arnie and his car. She would wait until he came home. Say what she had to say looking him in the face.

She said it now. “Arnie, I'm sorry.”

It would have been better if Mike could be here, too. But he was in Kansas City, attending a symposium on trade and the beginnings of free enterprise in the Middle Ages. He wouldn't be back until Sunday, unless this brought him home early. She thought it might. She realized—not without some rue—that she might just be awakening to the full seriousness of this situation.

“Sorry,” Arnie echoed in a flat, accentless voice.

“Yes, I—that is,
we
—” She couldn't go on. There was something terrible in the deadwood of his expression. His eyes were blanks. She could only look at him and shake her head, her eyes brimming, the hateful taste of tears in her nose and throat. She hated to cry. Strong-willed, one of two girls in a Catholic family that consisted of her blue-collar construction-worker father, her washed-out mother, and seven brothers, hellbent on college in spite of her father's belief that the only things girls learned there was how to stop being virgins and how to throw over the church, she had shed her fair share of tears and more. And if her own family thought she was hard sometimes, it was because they didn't understand that when you went through hell you came out baked by the fire. And when you had to burn to have your own way, you always wanted to have it.

“You know something?” Arnie asked.

She shook her head, still feeling the hot, slithery burn of the tears under her lids.

“You'd make me laugh, if I wasn't so tired I could hardly stand up. You could have been out there swinging the tire irons and the hammers along with the guys that did it. You're probably happier about it than they are.”

“Arnie, that's not fair!”

“It
is
fair!” he roared at her, his eyes suddenly blazing with a horrible fire. For the first time in her life she was afraid of her son. “Your idea to get it out of the driveway! His idea to put it in the airport lot! Who do you think is to blame here? Just who do you think? Do you think it would have happened if it had been here? Huh?”

He took a step toward her, fists clenched at his sides, and she had all she could do to keep from flinching backward.

“Arnie, can't we even talk about this?” she asked. “Like two rational human beings?”

“One of them took a shit on the dashboard of my car,” he said coldly. “How's that for rational, Mom?”

She had honestly believed she had the tears under control, but this news—news of such a stupid, irrational fury—brought them back. She cried. She cried in grief for what her son had seen. She lowered her head and cried in bewilderment and pain and fear.

All her life as a mother she had felt secretly superior to the women around her who had children older than Arnie. When he was one, those other mothers had shaken their heads dolefully and told her to wait until he was five—that was when the trouble started, that was when they were old enough to say “shit” in front of their grandmothers and play with matches when left alone. But Arnold, as good as gold at one, had still been as good as gold at five. Then the other mothers had rolled their eyes and said wait until he's ten; and then it had been fifteen, that was when it really got sticky, what with the dope and the rock concerts and girls that would do anything and—God forbid—stealing hubcaps and those . . . well, diseases.

And through it all she had continued to smile inside because it was all working out according to plan, it was all working out the way she felt her own childhood should have. Her son had warm, supportive parents who cared about him, who would give him anything (within reason), who would gladly send him to the college of his choice (as long as it was a good one), thereby finishing the game/business/vocation of Parenting with a flourish. If you had suggested that Arnie had few friends and was often bullyragged by the others, she would have starchily pointed out that
she
had gone to a parochial school in a tough neighborhood where girls' cotton panties were sometimes torn off for a joke and then set on fire with Zippo lighters engraved with the crucified body of Jesus. And if you had suggested that her own attitudes toward child-rearing differed only in terms of material goals from the attitudes of her hated father, she would have been furious and pointed out her good son as her final vindication.

But now her good son stood before her, pale, exhausted, and greased to the elbows, seeming to thrum with the same sort of barely chained anger that had been his grandfather's trademark, even
looking like
him. Everything seemed to have fallen into a shambles.

“Arnie, we'll talk about what's to be done in the morning,” she said, trying to pull herself together and beat back the tears. “Well talk about it in the morning.”

“Not unless you get up real early,” he said, seeming to lose interest. “I'm going upstairs and catch about four hours, and then I'm going down to the garage again.”

“What for?”

He uttered a crazy laugh and flapped his arms under the kitchen's fluorescent bars as if he would fly. “What do you think for? I got a lot of work to do! More work than you'd believe!”

“No—you have school tomorrow . . . I . . . I forbid it, Arnie, I absolutely—”

He turned to look at her, study her, and she flinched again. This was like some grinding nightmare that was just going to go on and on.

“I'll get to school,” he said. “I'll take some fresh clothes in a pack and I'll even shower so I don't smell offensive to anyone in homeroom. Then, after school's out, I'll go back down to Darnell's. There's a lot of work to be done, but I can do it . . . I know I can . . . it's going to eat up a lot of my savings, though. Plus, I'll have to keep on top of the stuff I'm doing for Will.”

“Your homework. . . your studies!”

“Oh. Those.” He smiled the dead, mechanical smile of a clockwork figure. “They'll suffer, of course. Can't kid you about that. I can't promise you a ninety-three average anymore, either. But I'll get by. I can make C's. Maybe some B's.”

“No! You've got college to think about!”

He came back to the table, limping again, quite badly. He planted his hands on the table before her and leaned slowly down. She thought:
A stranger . . . my son is a stranger to me. Is this really my fault? Is it? Because I only wanted what was best for him? Can that be? Please, God, make this a nightmare I'll wake up from with tears on my cheeks because it was so real.

“Right now,” he said softly, holding her gaze, “the only things I care about are Christine and Leigh and staying on the good side of Will Darnell so I can get her fixed up as good as new. I don't give a shit about college. And if you don't get off my case, I'll drop out of high school. That ought to shut you up if nothing else will.”

“You can't,” she said, meeting his gaze. “You understand that, Arnold. Maybe I deserve your . . . your cruelty . . . but I'll fight this self-destructive streak of yours with everything I have. So don't you talk about dropping out of school.”

“But I'll really do it,” he answered. “I don't want you to even kid yourself into thinking I won't. I'll be eighteen in February, and I'll do it on my own then if you don't stay out of this from now on. Do you understand me?”

“Go to bed,” she said tearfully. “Go to bed, you're breaking my heart.”

“Am I?” Shockingly, he laughed. “Hurts, doesn't it? I know.”

He left then, walking slowly, the limp pulling his body slightly to the left. Shortly she heard the heavy, tired clump of his shoes on the stairs—also a sound terribly reminiscent of her childhood, when she had thought to herself,
The ogre's going to bed.

She burst into a fresh spasm of weeping, got up clumsily, and went out the back door to do her crying in private. She held herself—thin comfort, but better than none—and looked up at a horned moon that was quadrupled through the film of her tears. Everything had changed, and it had happened with the speed of a cyclone. Her son hated her; she had seen it in his face—it wasn't a tantrum, a temporary pique, a passing squall of adolescence. He
hated
her, and this wasn't the way it was supposed to go with her good boy, not at all.

Not at
all.

She stood on the stoop and cried until the tears began to run their course and the sobs became occasional hitchings and gasps. The cold gnawed her bare ankles above her mules and bit more bluntly through her housecoat. She went inside and upstairs. She stood outside Arnie's room indecisively for almost a minute before going in.

He had fallen asleep on the coverlet of his bed. His pants were still on. He seemed more unconscious than asleep, and his face looked horribly old. A trick of the light, coming from the hall and falling into the room from over her shoulder, made it seem for a moment to her that his hair was thinning, that his sleep-gaping mouth was without teeth. A small squeal of horror strained itself through the hand clapped to her mouth and she hurried toward him.

Her shadow, which had been on the bed, moved with her and she saw it was only Arnie, the impression of age no more than the light and her own exhausted confusion.

She looked at his clock-radio and saw that it was set for 4:30
A.M.
She thought of turning the alarm off; she even stretched her hand out to do it. Ultimately she found she couldn't.

Instead she went down to her bedroom, sat down at the phone table, and picked up the handset. She held it for a moment, debating. If she called Mike in the middle of the night, he would think that. . .

That something terrible had happened?

She giggled. Well,
hadn't
it? It surely had. And it was still happening.

She dialled the number of the Ramada Inn in Kansas City where her husband was staying, vaguely aware that she was, for the first time since she had left the grim and grimy three-story house in Rocksburg for college twenty-seven years before, calling for help.

28

Leigh Makes a Visit

She got through most of the story okay, sitting in one of the two visitors' chairs with her knees pressed firmly together and her ankles crossed, neatly dressed in a multicolored wool sweater and a brown corduroy skirt. It was not until the end that she began to cry, and she couldn
't find a handkerchief. Dennis Guilder handed her the box of tissues from the table beside the bed.

“Take it easy, Leigh,” he said.

“I cuh-cuh-can't! He hasn't been to see me . . . and in school he just seems so tired . . . and you s-said he hasn't been here—”

“He'll come if he needs me,” Dennis said.

“You're full of muh-macho b-bull-sh-sh-shit!” she said, and then looked comically stunned at what she had said. The tears had cut tracks in the light makeup she was wearing. She and Dennis looked at each other for a moment, and then they laughed. But it was brief laughter, and not really that good.

“Has Motormouth seen him?” Dennis asked.

“Who?”

“Motormouth. That's what Lenny Barongg calls Mr. Vickers. The guidance counsellor.”

“Oh! Yes, I think he has. He was called to the guidance office the day before yesterday—Monday. But he didn't say anything. And I didn't dare ask him anything. He won't talk. He's gotten so strange.”

Dennis nodded. Although he didn't think Leigh realized it—she was deep in her own trouble and confusion—he felt a sense of impotence and a deepening fear for Arnie. From the reports that had filtered into his room over the last few days, Arnie sounded on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Leigh's report was only the most recent and the most graphic. He had never wanted to be
out
as badly as he did now. Of course, he could call Vickers and ask him if there was anything he could do. And he could call Arnie . . . except, from what Leigh had said, Arnie was now always at school, at Darnell's, or sleeping. His father had come home early from some sort of convention and there had been another fight, Leigh had told him. Although Arnie had not come right out and said so, Leigh told Dennis she believed that he had come very close to simply leaving home.

Dennis didn't want to talk to Arnie at Darnell's.

“What can I do?” she asked him. “What would you do, in my place?”

“Wait,” Dennis said. “I don't know what else you can do.”

“But that's hardest,” she answered in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. Her hands were clenching and unclenching on the Kleenex, shredding it, dotting her brown skirt with speckles of lint. “My folks want me to stop seeing him—to drop him. They're afraid . . . that Repperton and those other boys will do something else.”

“You're pretty sure it was Buddy and his friends, huh?”

“Yes. Everybody is. Mr. Cunningham called the police even though Arnie told him not to. He said he'd settle the score in his own way, and that scared them both. It scares me, too. The police picked up Buddy Repperton, and one of his friends, the one they call Moochie . . . do you know who I mean?”

“Yes.”

“And the boy who works nights at the airport parking lot, they picked him up, too. Galton, his name is—”

“Sandy.”

“They thought he must have been in on it, that maybe he let them in.”

“He runs with them, all right,” Dennis said, “but he's not quite as degenerate as the rest of them. I'll say this, Leigh—if Arnie didn't talk to you, someone sure did.”

“First Mrs. Cunningham and then his father. I don't think either of them knew the other one had talked to me. They're . . .”

“Upset,” Dennis suggested.

She shook her head. “It's more than that,” she said. “They both look like they were just . . . just mugged, or something. I can't really feel sorry for
her
—all she wants is her own way, I think—but I could cry for Mr. Cunningham. He just seems so . . . so . . .” She trailed off and then began again. “When I got there yesterday afternoon after school, Mrs. Cunningham—she asked me to call her Regina, but I just can't seem to do it—”

Dennis grinned.

“Can you do it?” Leigh asked.

“Well, yeah—but I've had a lot more practice.”

She smiled, the first good one of her visit. “Maybe that
would
make a difference. Anyway, when I went over, she was there but Mr. Cunningham was still at school . . . the University, I mean.”

“Yeah.”

“She took the whole week off—what there is of it. She said she couldn't go back, even for the three days before Thanksgiving.”

“How does she look?”

“She looks shattered,” Leigh said, and reached for a fresh Kleenex. She began shredding the edges. “She looks ten years older than when I first met her a month ago.”

“And him? Michael?”

“Older, but tougher,” Leigh said hesitantly. “As if this had somehow . . . somehow gotten him into gear.”

Dennis was silent. He had known Michael Cunningham for thirteen years and had never seen him in gear, so he wouldn't know. Regina had always been the one in gear; Michael trailed along in her wake and made the drinks at the parties (mostly faculty parties) the Cunninghams hosted. He played his recorder, he looked melancholy . . . but by no stretch of the imagination could Dennis say he had ever seen the man “in gear.”

The final triumph,
Dennis's father had said once, standing at the window and watching Regina lead Arnie by the hand down the Guilders' walk to where Michael waited behind the wheel of the car. Arnie and Dennis had been perhaps seven then.
Momism supreme. I wonder if she'll make the poor slob wait in the car when Arnie gets married. Or maybe she can—

Dennis's mother had frowned at her husband and shushed him by cutting her eyes at Dennis in a little-pitchers-have-big-ears gesture. He never forgot the gesture or what his father had said—at seven he hadn't understood all of it, but even at seven he knew perfectly well what a “poor slob” was. And even at seven he vaguely understood why his father might think Michael Cunningham was one. He had felt sad for Michael Cunningham . . . and that feeling had held, off and on, right up to the present.

“He came in around the time she was finishing
her
story,” Leigh went on. “They asked me to stay for supper—Arnie has been eating down at Darnell's—but I told them I really had to get back. So Mr. Cunningham offered me a ride, and I got his side on the way home.”

“Are they on different sides?”

“Not exactly, but . . . Mr. Cunningham was the one who went to see the police, for instance. Arnie didn't want to, and Mrs. Cunningham—Regina—couldn't bring herself to do it.”

Dennis asked cautiously, “He's really trying to put Humpty back together again, huh?”

“Yes,” she whispered, and then burst out shrilly: “But that's not all! He's in deep with that guy Darnell, I know he is! Yesterday in period three study hall he told me he was going to drop a new front end into her—into his car—this afternoon and this evening, and I said won't that be awfully expensive Arnie, and he said not to worry about it because his credit was good—”

“Slow down.”

She was crying again. “His credit was good because he and someone named Jimmy Sykes were going to do some errands for Will Friday and Saturday. That's what he said. And . . . I don't think the errands he does for that sonofabitch are legal!”

“What did he tell the police when they came to ask about Christine?”

“He told them about finding it . . . that way. They asked him if he had any ideas who might have done it, and Arnie said no. They asked him if it wasn't true that he had gotten into a fight with Buddy Repperton, that Repperton had pulled a knife and had been expelled for it. Arnie said that Repperton had knocked his bag lunch out of his hand and stepped on it, then Mr. Casey came over from the shop and broke it up. They asked him if Repperton hadn't said he would get him for it, and Arnie said he might have said something like that, but talk was cheap.”

Dennis was silent, looking out his window at a dull November sky, considering this. He found it ominous. If Leigh had the interview with the police right, then Arnie hadn't told a single lie . . . but he had edited things to make what had happened in the smoking area sound like your ordinary pushy-pushy.

Dennis found that extremely ominous.

“Do you know what Arnie might be doing for that man Darnell?” Leigh asked.

“No,” Dennis answered, but he had some ideas. A little internal tape recorder started up, and he heard his father saying,
I've heard a few things . . . stolen cars . . . cigarettes and booze . . . contraband like fireworks. . . . He's been lucky for a long time, Dennis.

He looked at Leigh's face, too pale, her makeup cut open by her tears. She was hanging on, hanging onto Arnie as best she could. Maybe she was learning something about being tough that she wouldn't have learned otherwise, with her looks, for another ten years. But that didn't make it any easier, and it didn't necessarily make it right. It occurred to him suddenly, almost randomly, that he had first noticed the improvement in Arnie's face more than a month before Arnie and Leigh clicked . . . but after Arnie and Christine had clicked.

“I'll talk to him,” he promised.

“Good,” she said. She stood up. “I—I don't want things to be like they were before, Dennis. I know that nothing ever is. But I still love him, and . . . and I just wish you'd tell him that.”

“Yeah, okay.”

They were both embarrassed, and neither of them could say anything for a long, long moment. Dennis was thinking that this would be the point, in a c & w song, where the Best Friend steps in. And a sneaking, mean (and randy) part of him wouldn't be averse to that. Not at all. He was still powerfully attracted to her, more attracted than he had been to any girl in a long time. Maybe ever. Let Arnie run bottle-rockets and cherry-bombs over to Burlington and fuck around with his car. He and Leigh could get to know each other better in the meantime. A little aid and comfort. You know how it is.

And he had a feeling at just that awkward moment, after her profession of love for Arnie, that he could do it; she was vulnerable. She was maybe learning how to be tough, but it's not a school anyone goes to willingly. He could say something—the right something, maybe only
Come here
—and she would come, sit on the edge of the bed, they would talk some more, maybe about pleasanter things, and maybe he would kiss her. Her mouth was lovely and full, sensual, made to kiss and be kissed. Once for comfort. Twice out of friendship. And three times pays for all. Yes, he felt with an instinct that had so far been quite reliable that it could be done.

But he didn't say any of the things that could have started those things happening, and neither did Leigh. Arnie was between them, and almost surely always would be. Arnie and his lady. If it hadn't been so ludicrously ghastly, he could have laughed.

“When are they letting you out?” she asked.

“On an unsuspecting public?” he asked, and began to giggle. After a moment she joined him in his laughter.

“Yes, something like that,” Leigh said, and then snickered again. “Sorry.”

“Don't be,” Dennis said. “People have been laughing at me all my life. I'm used to it. They say I'm stuck here until January, but I'm going to fool them. I'm going home for Christmas. I'm working my buns off down in the torture chamber.”

“Torture chamber?”

“Physical therapy. My back's looking good. The other bones are knitting busily—the itch is terrible sometimes. I'm gobbling rosehips by the bushel basket. Dr. Arroway says that's nothing but a folk-tale. But Coach Puffer swears by them, and he checks the bottle every time he comes to visit.”

“Does he come often? The Coach?”

“Yeah, he does. Now he's got me half-believing that stuff about rosehips making your broken bones knit faster.” Dennis paused. “Of course, I'm not going to be playing any more football, not ever. I'm going to be on crutches for a while, and then, with luck, I'll graduate to a cane. Cheerful old Dr. Arroway tells me I'm going to limp for maybe a couple of years. Or maybe I'll always limp.”

“I'm so sorry,” she said in a low voice. “I'm sorry it had to happen to a nice guy like you, Dennis, but part of it's selfish. I just wonder if all the rest of this, all this horrible stuff with Arnie, if it would have happened if you'd been up and around.”

“That's right,” Dennis said, rolling his eyes dramatically, “blame it on me.”

But she didn't smile. “I've started to worry about his sanity, did you know that? That's the one thing I haven't told my folks or his folks. But I think his mother . . . that she might . . . I don't know what he said to her that night, after we found the car all smashed up, but . . . I think they must have really put their claws into each other.”

Dennis nodded.

“But it's all so . . . so mad! His parents offered to buy him a good used car to replace Christine, and he said no. Then Mr. Cunningham told me, on the ride home, that he offered to buy Arnie a new car . . . to cash in some bonds he's held ever since 1955. Arnie said no, he couldn't just take a present like that. And Mr. Cunningham said he could understand that, and it didn't have to be a present, that Arnie could pay him back, that he'd even take interest if that was what Arnie wanted. . . . Dennis, do you see what I'm saying?”

“Yeah,” Dennis said. “It can't be just any car. It's got to be
that
car. Christine.”

“But to me that seems obsessive. He's found one object and fixed on it. Isn't that what an obsession is? I'm scared, and sometimes I feel hateful . . . but it's not him I'm scared of. It's not him I hate. It's that frig—no, it's that
fucking
car. That bitch Christine.”